Читать книгу Tokyo a Cultural Guide - John H. Martin - Страница 8

WHEN Tokugawa Ieyasu planned his castle in Edo in 1590, he chose to build it on the high ground above the Hibiya Inlet which spread inland from the great bay (Tokyo Bay) in front of his new capital. Under his direction, that inlet and various rivers in the vicinity of the castle were channeled so as to form canals and moats about the innermost portion of the city. Here, behind these watery barriers, the shogunal headquarters were to rise protected by fortified walls and water-filled moats.

The Hibiya Inlet in front of the eastern side of the castle was soon filled in, leaving an inner moat and, beyond the filled inlet, an outer moat. Earth for the project was taken from the higher terrain known as Yamanote (The High City) to the west and north. Upon the newly reclaimed land between the inner and outer moats, an area called Marunouchi (Within the Moats) housed the mansions of the daimyo most favored by the Tokugawa shoguns. Additional fill was used which formed the shitamachi (literally, the "low city") to the east in which lived the common workers who supplied the daimyo and their entourages with their daily needs.

Around the moated castle enclave, between the inner and outer moats, were placed the residences of Ieyasu's most trusted Inside Lords. Today, Uchibori-dori (Inner Moat Street) borders the Imperial Palace grounds on the palace's eastern side, and a portion of this moat is still in existence. Sotobori-dori (Outer Moat Street) has in the twentieth century become a ring road about the original central portion of Tokyo and the Imperial Palace grounds. It is only in the decades after the Second World War that the remaining portions of this latter moat were filled in, thus Sotobori-dori now varies between being a ground-level roadway and, in part, an elevated and then an underground roadway. In the northeast portion of the Marunouchi area, between today's Tokyo Central Station and the palace grounds, lay the mansions and dependencies of the Matsudaira lords. To the south, in front of today's Imperial Palace Plaza were the mansions of the Honda, the Sakai, and other favored daimyo,

For some 260 years, these lands housed the most powerful military leaders of Japan. By the 1860s, however, the political and military power of the last two shoguns gradually dissipated. The rule of sankin kotai (alternate attendance) which, after 1635, required both the Inside and Outside Lords to spend two years in Edo and two years in their own lands on an alternate basis, came to an end. Then in 1868, with the victory of the adherents of the Emperor Meiji over the Tokugawa shogunate, the mansions of all the daimyo were abandoned as the provincial lords returned to their home provinces. The deserted buildings were by 1871 either used for government offices when these offices were moved to Tokyo from Kyoto or were cleared for military drill grounds for a growing and ever more militaristic government.

By 1890, within twenty years of the imperial takeover of Edo (now Tokyo), the Meiji government and the military authorities required funds for the development of new establishments for their growing needs. Thus the land "within the moats" was put up for sale. The Imperial Household did not have the funds to purchase the land, and thus the Iwasaki family, a leading mercantile and growing industrial clan, were prevailed upon to purchase the vacant Marunouchi area in front of the palace grounds. Known derisively as the Mitsubishi Meadow or even the "Gambler's Meadow" by those who did not have the foresight to buy the land, the Marunouchi district was planned by the Iwasakis to become a Western-style complex of buildings for the industrial and commercial growth they foresaw for the nation. To this end they hired Josiah Conder, an English architect who came to live in Japan in 1877 and who worked not only as an architect but as an instructor at the College of Technology (later to become Tokyo University) to teach architecture. Here he trained the first generation of Japanese architects in the technicalities of Western architecture.

Conder's three-story buildings, which he designed for the Mitsubishi group, were red-brick structures with white stone quoins. Windows and doors were outlined in white stone. Th new Western-style district he created was known as "London Town." Its streets were lined with trees and the newest of modern appurtenances, poles to support above-ground electric wires. London Town with its Queen Anne style architecture in Marunouchi, and the not-too-distant Ginza area with its newly paved streets and brick-built structures, were the pride of the Meiji era.

The sponsors of London Town hoped that it would quickly become the new commercial and financial center of Tokyo. The first building was completed in 1894, but unfortunately the Stock Exchange, the Bank of Japan, and other financial and commercial establishments remained in Nihombashi to the east. Success for London Town had to await the arrival of the railroad into central Tokyo.

The extension of the railroad from Shimbashi, south of the Ginza area, into Marunouchi finally became a reality in 1914. Dr. Tatsuno Kingo, a student of Josiah Conder, was named as the architect of the new Tokyo Central Station (where this walking tour begins), which opened in 1914. The 1,000-foot-long red-brick Renaissance-style station was modeled after the Amsterdam Zentraal station in the Netherlands. The new station faced toward the east, toward London Town and the Imperial Palace. The plan to have an entrance on the eastern side of the station was stymied for years since the Sotobori (Outer Moat) still ran parallel to the railroad right-of-way to the east, and the interests of the Nihombashi and Kyobashi officials could not be satisfied since each wanted a bridge over the moat to their district. The dispute was not resolved until 1929 when an eastern entrance to the station was created. This latter entrance was greatly enhanced in the 1960s when the high-speed Shinkansen Line with its "Bullet Trains" came into being, for then a whole new, modern terminal structure was built behind the existing station. Also the Daimaru Department Store was built, facing Yaesu Plaza, which covers a portion of the former Sotobori.

Tokyo Central Station, after its opening in 1914, was meant as a memorial for Japan's victory over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, and its main entrance was reserved solely for royal use. The station remained central in name only, for it was the terminus for trains from the south while the station at Ueno (to the north) was the terminus for trains from the north and east. Not until after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 could the two stations be linked, a possibility brought about by the earthquake's destruction of the buildings between the two terminals. With the completion of the elevated Yamanote Line in 1925, which circles a major portion of Tokyo, it was finally possible to link Ueno Station and Tokyo Central Station.

The early future of Marunouchi looked brighter when the Tokyo city and prefectural governments agreed to share a new building in the former daimyo quarter. A red-brick, Western-style structure was to arise in Marunouchi with the prefectural offices to the right while the city offices were to the left. Each had the image of its patron before its portion of the structure: Ota Dokan, the founder of the earlier Edo Castle in the mid-1400s, was placed before the city sector of the building. Tokugawa Ieyasu, the second founder of Edo in the 1590s, stood before the prefectural offices. (A new, modern city hall was erected on the site in 1957 under the direction of the noted Japanese architect Kenzo Tange. As with its predecessor, it was to be razed after 1991 as the city hall moved farther west to Shinjuku. The new city hall was also designed by Tange.)

The new station became the "front door" to the city, and gradually office buildings in Marunouchi, as London Town came to be known, filled the "Mitsubishi Meadows" between the railroad and the Palace over the next twenty-five years. The life of modern buildings is frequently all too short, and Conder's buildings gradually were replaced from 1930 on by newer and larger structures. The last remnant of London Town, Mitsubishi Building Number One, disappeared in 1967 in the post-Second World War construction boom. The limit of seven to eight floors (100 feet in height) for the buildings in Marunouchi, out of respect to the adjacent Imperial Palace, which it would not be proper to overshadow, was to go the way of many such traditions after the 1950s, and today the financial and commercial headquarters of Japanese and international firms tower over the Imperial Palace grounds. Other traditions, such as the placing of an image of the Buddha under the roof of a building as protection against lightning, are no longer recognized. According to Edward Seidensticker, one of these original Buddhas resides in the basement of the Marunouchi Building, hardly a protection against the deity of lightning.

This tour of Marunouchi and Yurakucho begins at the eastern side of Tokyo Central Station, a bustling center whose daily train traffic its original planners could not have envisioned. Twelve train platforms above and below ground receive three thousand train arrivals a day. A small park graces the area before the station with the Tokyo Central Post Office on the left and a bus terminal to the right. A broad street leads from the plaza in front of the station to Hibiya-dori and the park before the Imperial Palace that was created in 1926. The building on the left of the beginning of this boulevard was the Marunouchi Building (Maru Number One), completed just before the 1923 earthquake. It marked the beginning of a new era for Marunouchi, for this eight-story building was the largest one in Japan at the time, and it helped to attract financial and commercial firms to this area of geometrically planned streets. The district was fortunate in that it remained undamaged in the 1923 earthquake and from the major air raids of 1945, although it too is now gone.

A companion building on the right of the beginning of the boulevard is the New Marunouchi Building (Maru Number Two), which appears to be a twin to the original structure across the way. Its foundations were in place before the Second World War, but it remained a stagnant pool until 1951, when work finally commenced on its completion. The success of the onetime London Town is obvious from the number of high-rise buildings in the district. The 1958 Otemachi Building, which can hold forty-thousand employees, is a prime example of the change which has come over the "Mitsubishi Meadows."

Two streets along the boulevard bring one to Hibiya-dori, the Babasaki-bori (Moat in Front of the Horse Grounds), and the beginning of the Imperial Palace Outer Gardens. (The moat has this strange name since it derives from a 1635 display of horse-manship presented before the shogun by a delegation from the then dependent Kingdom of Korea.) When the capital was moved to Tokyo in 1868, three areas which were a portion of the castle grounds were gradually given to the public as parkland. These include the Imperial Palace Outer Garden along Hibiyadori in front of the Palace, the Imperial Palace East Garden, which contains the remains of the former Tokugawa castle, and the Kita-no-Maru Park, which was once also a part of the castle grounds. The Outer Garden has seen momentous events since it was separated from the Imperial Palace grounds. Here refugees from the destruction of the 1923 earthquake gathered, and here in August of 1945 a number of Japan's officer corps committed seppuku (ritual suicide), their deaths supposedly atoning for Japan's loss in the Pacific War. In the 1950s and 1960s it became a place for public demonstrations against unpopular government decisions. Many of these gatherings were anti-American in nature.

Hibiya-dori extends along the Outer Gardens and the palace with a range of modern office buildings on its eastern side. Turning to the left from the boulevard leading from the Tokyo Station and heading south (to the left) on Hibiya-dori, the present buildings between the railway and the Outer Garden cover not only the site of the Matsudaira daimyo mansion and ancillary buildings but also the building in which the shogun's chief Confucian advisor, Hayashi Razan, once held sway.

Prior to the nineteenth century the shogunal fire department was located where the Meiji Life Insurance Building now stands across from the bridge over the Babasaki Moat. Edo never boasted an organization which could fight the "Flowers of Edo," outbreaks of fires which occurred all too frequently. Each daimyo and the shogun had men who could serve to protect their lord's property, but the common citizen was on his own in his warren of wooden houses in the shitamachi when fires broke out. Unfortunately, not even the firefighters of the daimyo were always successful, and in the Long Sleeves Fire of 1657 the shogun's castle was engulfed in flames and destroyed. The shogunal fire detachment can lay claim to fame even today on one score, however, for here at the location of the Meiji Life Insurance Building a son was born to one of the shogun's firefighters. He forsook his father's profession, and Ando Hiroshige chose to make his name through his woodblock prints instead.

One full street along Hibiya-dori beyond the bridge over the Babasaki Moat is the Kokusai Building. Within it is the Imperial Theater, which opened in 1911. It was the first major Western-style theater in Tokyo, and it was highly decorated with a generous use of marble. Splendid tapestries hung in it as well, reminiscent of the richness of the Paris Opera House. This 1,900-seat theater was initially intended for concerts and recitals as well as for Kabuki, but it proved unsuitable for this latter art form. In more recent years, after a 1966 renovation when the stage and its equipment were updated and a restrained decor pervaded the hall of the playhouse, it has been home to many popular contemporary American musicals. The theater occupies the first three floors of the Kokusai Building.

The main entrance to the Kokusai Building is found on its south side. Here are elevators which may be taken to the ninth floor to the Idemitsu Art Museum, a museum containing one of the finest collections of Asian art in Japan. (The museum is open from 10:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. NO admission after 4:30. It is closed Mondays, but open on Monday if a national holiday and then closed the next day. Also closed over the New Year holidays. Entry fee.) Created by the president of the Idemitsu Oil Company, it has four large rooms which provide space for the display of the riches of the collection. The main room presents objects from the museum's fine collection of Chinese ceramics, which range from prehistoric times through to the eighteenth century. Japanese ceramics are also well represented with examples of Imari, Kutani, Seto, Nabeshima, and Kakiemon wares.

Another room shows selections from sixteenth and seventeenth century screens depicting episodes in The Tale of Genji as well as prints with scenes of Kyoto and Edo before 1868. The ukiyo-e woodblock prints in the collection illustrate an art form that was popular from the 1600s through the 1800s, and these prints are complemented by Zen paintings and fine examples of calligraphy. An additional room holds a varied and very large collection of ceramic shards representing a range of countries from Iran (Persia) to southeast and eastern Asia. Chinese and Japanese lacquerware of excellent quality are also on view. The labels in the exhibition cases are in English and Japanese. Since 1972 the museum has branched into another area of art with the acquisition of more than four hundred works by the French painter Georges Roualt.

Along with its artistic attractions, the location of the museum on the ninth floor of the Kokusai Building provides an excellent view of the Imperial Palace Outer Garden. In addition, a coffee shop offers a place to relax among the Asian works of art.

Continuing south on Hibiya-dori, across the street from the Kokusai Building is the Dai-Ichi Insurance Building, encompassing the full frontage of the street on which it sits facing the palace grounds. Built in 1938 to the design of Watanabe Matsumoto in what was a modern international style, particularly one favored by authoritarian governments of the day, ten huge columns of its facade supported two upper floors. One of the modern, fireproof buildings of pre-Second World War Tokyo, it managed to survive the bombings and firestorms of the war years. Today the facade of the building has been covered over with a bland end-of-the-twentieth-century facing while a new tower of twenty-one stories, designed by the American architect Kevin Roche, rises behind the original structure. Whatever character the front of the building once had has now been effaced.

Here in the original building, from September 15,1945, until April 11, 1951, General Douglas MacArthur had his headquarters as the military and civilian representative of the victorious Allied forces at the end of the Second World War. His sixth-floor, walnut-paneled office was simply furnished with a conference table and a green leather armchair. The General's office virtually became a museum after his departure, and now it is used by the head of the Dai-Ichi Mutual Insurance Company. The room is preserved, and requests may be made to the Dai-Ichi Insurance public relations office to view the room.

Crossing the street to the Imperial Outer Garden, which lies in front of the walls of the palace, one can enjoy one of the few open spaces within this crowded city. This portion of Tokyo has seen many transformations in the 550 years since Ota Dokan in 1457 first built his fortified mansion and two other fortresses on the height above today's garden. At that time there was no garden, for the Hibiya Inlet, an extension of Tokyo Bay, once stretched this far inland, providing a natural moat before the fortified hill. The tiny town that Ota Dokan began below his hillside fortress received its name of Edo (Water Front or Moudi of the River) from its location. The town was to grow, but in the unpredictable politics of his day, Ota Dokan was assassinated at his lord's behest in 1486, and his fortified mansion and stronghold became derelict. One hundred years had to pass before a more massive castle would arise on the site and before Edo would begin to grow into a major city.

This present parkland was created when Tokugawa Ieyasu moved his headquarters from Shizuoka to the site of Ota Dokan's castle in the 1590s. Ieyasu had the Hibiya Inlet filled in with land from the hills of Kanda to the north, and the newly created land became the site of the mansions of the Inside Lords, who were his closest allies. After 1868, with the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate, the Meiji government established its government offices in the area in which the daimyo had lived. These offices were relocated from Kyoto into former daimyo buildings in Tokyo, a not very satisfactory arrangement. Relocation of the offices into more practical quarters was inevitable, and in the period after 1889 the Marunouchi area, as described above, was sold to the Iwasaki family in order to raise funds for the proper housing of governmental functions. In 1889 that portion of what is now the Outer Gardens had the government offices removed. Pine trees were planted there, and the land in front of the palace became a public park.

In 1897 a bronze equestrian statue of Kusunoki Masashige, given to the nation by the wealthy Sumitomo family of Osaka, was cast by Takamura Koun and placed within the Outer Garden. The creation of this statue by order of the Meiji government was part of its attempt to establish new heroes whose actions in the past showed devotion to the Imperial House and to the emperor. Such public images were meant to enhance the government's new creed of loyalty to the emperor and the need to be ready to sacrifice oneself for the emperor and nation. These two virtues were evident in Kusunoki's life and exemplified by the way he defended Emperor Go-Daigo and his imperial prerogatives in the 1300s and then committed seppuku when his defense of the emperor against Ashikaga Takauji's usurpation of power failed in 1336.

Reverence to the god-emperor reached such ideological heights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that at one time passengers in the trams that went by the palace were expected to rise from their seats and bow to the emperor within its walls. The fact that the Meiji defenders of Imperial rule were themselves governing in the name of a powerless emperor, whose image they were using, was completely overlooked. A much lighter element was added to the northeast portion of the Outer Gardens in the 1960s when a large fountain within a pool was created to celebrate the wedding of the then crown prince (Emperor Heisei).

At the far end of the Outer Garden from Hibiya-dori another moat separates the palace walls from the public park, these various moats encircling the 250 acres of the palace grounds. The Imperial Palace today is located in the Nishi-no-Maru (Western Fortified Area) in what was one portion of the shoguns' castle confines. The raised ground of the palace, beyond the Outer Garden and moats, is faced with walls of huge stones brought by boat in the early 1600s from the Izu Peninsula some sixty miles to the southwest of Tokyo. These massive stones were dragged by teams of laborers supplied by the daimyo, along paths covered with seaweed to ease the movement of the heavily loaded sledges, from the bay to the castle grounds. Such fortified walls, before the development of modern gunpowder and explosives, could only be breached by treachery from within, by natural forces such as earthquakes, or through a siege which might starve a defending force into surrendering. In the more than 260 years of the enforced Tokugawa peace that followed 1603, these walls were neither breached nor attacked.

Most of the shogunal buildings in the Tokugawa castle were destroyed by fire in the years before Emperor Meiji arrived in his new capital. His sojourn in the castle grounds was briefer than anticipated, since in 1873 the last of the Tokugawa buildings were destroyed by fire, and the emperor and empress were forced to move to the Akasaka Palace grounds, where they lived in a former mansion of a branch of the Tokugawa family until 1889 when a new palace was completed on the palace grounds. This 1889 palace was destroyed in the air raids of early 1945.

When facing the palace grounds from the Outer Garden, one sees on the right the Fujimi Yagura (Mount Fuji Viewing Tower), while to the left stands the Fushimi Yagura (Fushimi Tower), two of the three remaining fortified towers of the Tokugawa castle. Toward the south end of the Outer Garden (to the left), Nijubashi (Double Bridge) comes into view along with the Fushimi Tower, both of them rising out of the Imperial moat. In the militaristic era of the 1930s and 40s, the bridge, the Fushimi Tower, and the walls of the palace grounds became a symbol of mystical patriotism for the Japanese. So mystical or mythical became the palace site where the god-emperor resided that when Emperor Hirohito at the end of the Second World War announced the capitulation of Japan, the more fanatical of Imperial Army officers performed ceremonial suicide before the palace enclave as atonement for the loss of Japanese military honor.

The Imperial Palace grounds are not open to the public except on two occasions: on the emperor's birthday on December 23 (from 8:30 A.M. to 11:00 A.M.) and at the start of the New Year on January 2 (from 9:30 A.M. to 3:00 P.M.). On December 23 the emperor greets the public from the balcony of the Kyukaden (The Hall of State), while at the New Year holiday the imperial family receives the public from the same balcony. The "Hall of State" is a 1968 ferroconcrete, earthquake-resistant and fireproof structure which serves as a reception and banqueting hall for official imperial events. The Kyukaden consists of three buildings: the Seiden, in which is the Pine Tree Hall (Matsu-no-ma) where the imperial family receives greetings from the prime minister and his cabinet in the annual New Year reception; the Homeiden where formal dinners are held for foreign dignitaries; and the Chowaden, which has the imperial balcony for imperial public greetings. The imperial private residence is in the Fukiage Palace in the western portion of the grounds, a structure which was constructed (1991-93) to replace the unit built after the Second World War. (In Tokugawa times this twenty-eight-acre sector provided land for the mansions of the three main branches of the Tokugawa family.) The private residence area has a gateway to the city through the Hanzomon gate on the western side of the palace grounds.

On the two occasions when they may visit these private areas, the public may come into the palace grounds by means of the 1888 Nijubashi bridge. Although it is usually referred to as the Double Bridge, the name originally referred to the Double Layer Bridge, a wooden bridge and later a steel bridge with an upper and a lower level. A modern single-layer steel bridge replaced the double bridge in 1964. Today, two bridges, one behind the other, give the name "Double Bridge" a new meaning. In the foreground is a stone bridge of two arches, the Shakkyo-bashi, which is also called the Megane-bashi since its two arches when reflected in the water form a whole circle and resemble a pair of spectacles (megane). During the public visitation to the Palace, one moves through the massive gateway with its guard stations to the palace grounds, over the Nijubashi bridge, through the Seimon (Main Gate), into the Kyakuden East Garden in five minutes or so, and to the Hall of State from whose balcony the imperial greetings are given.

Two other gates at the north end of the Outer Garden lead into the palace grounds. The Sakashita-mon (Gate at the Bottom of the Slope) provides an entrance to the brick structure which constitutes the Imperial Household Agency offices, the very conservative bureaucracy which safeguards and controls the heritage and activities of the imperial family. The buildings of the Household Agency stand before Momijiyama, the hill named for its maple trees, an area which is more poetically known as the Hill of Autumn Leaves from the lovely color of the foliage of the trees at the end of the summer season. On this hill stood the Toshogu shrine to the spirit of Tokugawa Ieyasu, one of the many shrines raised to his spiritthroughoutJapan and which culminated in the highly ornate shrine in his honor at Nikko. The other gate, the Kikyo-mon (Bellflower gate), is the entry for visitors and officials to the palace and for the delivery of supplies by tradesmen. Its name is said to derive from the family crest of Ota Dokan, which contained a bellflower.

Leaving the Outer Garden grounds from the southwestern corner, one exits through the Sakurada-mon gate of the palace. It was one of the masugata gates that are described in the next tour, a tour which is concerned with the original castle and its present site. Here on March 24, 1860, occurred an event which was to weaken the Tokugawa shogunate and help to lead to its ultimate demise eight years later. At the Sakurada-mon (Gate of the Field of Cherry Trees) on a snowy morning, Ii Naosuke, Lord of Hikone, and his guards made their way to the castle grounds. Ii was one of the more important advisors to the shogun, and he had signed the unequal treaties with the West, treaties opposed by the emperor in Kyoto, his courtiers, and even some branches of the Tokugawa clan. Assassins from the Mito branch of the Tokugawa, opposed to the agreements with the "Western barbarians," fell upon Ii and his guards, leaving their bodies in the bloodied snow.

Ironically, walking through the Sakurada-mon gate and crossing the Gaisen-Hibiya moat today and then Harumi-dori, one is faced by the white-tiled exterior of the 1980 eighteen-story Metropolitan Police Department headquarters to the right and tile 1895 Ministry of Justice building to the left. The present police headquarters stands on the site of a pre-Second World War jail, one in which the captured fliers of General Doolittle's raid on Tokyo were held in 1942 before being taken to Sugamo Prison to be executed. The Ministry of Justice building was designed by two architects from Germany. They wished to combine the best of traditional Japanese and Western architecture in this new structure, but in the press for modernization in the 1890s, government officials insisted on a more Western style to prevail. The original roof of the building was damaged in the 1945 air raids and was replaced with a flat roof which would have caused the architects even further unhappiness. It is one of the few Meiji era brick buildings still standing, and it and its grounds underwent extensive restoration in the 1990s.

Turning to the left along Harumi-dori, the northwest corner of Hibiya Park is at hand. Halfway down the street there is a path which leads through this forty-one-acre park which held daimyo residences before 1868. Whereas Shogun Ieyasu's most dependable allies had their mansions in front of the castle gate in the Marunouchi area, the Outside Lords who were not among Ieyasu's allies prior to 1603 were permitted to lease lands at a further remove from the castle main gate. Living in what is today's Hibiya Park area, they were close enough for the shogun's spies to keep an eye on them, but they were not so close to the shogun and his retinue that they could act upon any treacherous intentions. Here were the residences of the powerful Nabeshima clan of Saga on the island of Kyushu and that of the Mori clan of Choshu in western Japan, mansions located beyond the outer ramparts of the castle. Sixty percent of the land in Edo belonged to the daimyo and their followers, who represented less than half the population of Edo, while twenty percent was occupied by commoners, and another twenty percent was given over to temples and shrines.

The daimyo had to express their status by their show of splendor, and thus they built their residences in the extravagant, highly decorated Momoyama architectural style popular at the beginning of the 1600s. The original Momoyama mansions were destroyed in the Long Sleeves Fire of 1657, and the replacement structures were, of necessity, in a more simple style. New sumptuary laws and the alternate attendance requirement, with its costly journeys by full entourages and the expense of maintaining mansions in home provinces as well as Edo, were a crippling burden for the daimyo.

By 1871 the land once occupied by both the Inside and the Outside Lords had been confiscated by the new Meiji government, and the land was cleared, leaving but a vestige of the past in the northeast corner of Hibiya Park where a portion of the original wall of the Hibiya Gate of the former moat remains. What in 1903 was to become Hibiya Park was in the 1870s a dusty military parade ground, and here in 1872 Emperor Meiji reviewed his troops. with the military wishing to create a permanent Tokyo headquarters, their parade ground was moved to the edge of the city in the 1890s. Plans were drawn to build Western-style government offices on the former military parade grounds. The subsoil was found to be too soft to support modern brick and stone structures, however, and, given the engineering of the day and the fact that this had once been an arm of Tokyo Bay before it was filled in, construction of modern buildings was out of the question.

Plans were therefore made to establish a park on the site, and it was opened to the public in June 1903. It was one of the first Western-style parks in Japan. Through the years the park has accrued several amenities: the Hibiya Gallery on its Harumi-dori side, a Public Hall of 1929 with its art nouveau touches on its southern side for concerts, lectures, meetings and other cultural activities, a public library adjacent to the hall, a cafe, two restaurants, a lake, ponds, lawns, flower gardens, tennis courts, and a tiered outdoor area where today jazz, folk, and other popular music attracts young music lovers. In 1961 a large fountain was added to the park, and it is illuminated with seven colors at night. The park also is notorious for having become a trysting place for lovers, and thereby a resort for peeping toms. There is even a small museum devoted to the history of the park. The museum is open from 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. except on Mondays.

The park is noted for its cherry blossoms in April, for its wisteria and azalea blooms in May, and for its magnificent display of chrysanthemums in November, this latter a festive event which draws many visitors. The park also contains dogwood trees that were a gift from the United States in appreciation of the Japanese cherry trees which were given by Tokyo to Washington, D.C.

In the unhappy days of the 1930s and 1940s, the park became an artillery battery, the lawns were replaced by vegetable plots, and, after the first American air raid by General Doolittle in 1942, anti-aircraft guns were put into place.

The Imperial Palace Outer Gardens were not the only public spot used for dissent in the past. In 1905 some 30,000 protesters gathered at Hibiya Park to object to the terms of the peace treaty at the end of the Russo-Japanese War, and, as a result of the violence which ensued, the government declared martial law. Again in the 1950s and 1960s, protests against Japanese government relations with the United States were centered here. The Hibiya Public Hall, which has served as the site of political party meetings, has had its unhappy incidents as well, the most notable occurring in 1960 when Inejiro Asanuma, the chairman of the Japan Socialist Party, was killed at the podium by a sword-wielding student.

Across from the southern end of the park and the Public Hall and Library is Hibiya City, which is similar to New York City's Rockefeller Center in that it has a large, open skating rink, fountains, and statuary within the square of shops and corporate display centers.

If Hibiya Park represented an early Western-style influence, there was an even earlier attempt at "Westernization" across Hibiya-dori on lands once held by the Outside Lords of Satsuma. After the nation opened its doors to the world in the 1860s, Japan had been forced by the Western nations to grant certain extra-territorial rights to Western governments. These restrictions obviously rankled members of the Japanese government, and numerous attempts were made to remove these limitations on Japanese sovereignty so as to permit Japan in an international context to assume its status as an equal with the European nations and the United States.

One of the more futile of these attempts occurred in 1881 when Kaoru Inoue, then foreign minister of Japan, had the Rokumeikan hall erected to the south of where the Imperial Hotel now stands. This Western-style, two-story brick and stucco structure designed by Josiah Conder, the British architect whose influence was so strong in Meijijapan, was a potpourri of Western architectural styles. As Paul Waley describes it, it had Mediterranean arcades on both floors, being of a Tuscan nature on the ground floor and of a vaguely Moorish nature on the second floor. Verandas ran the length of the building, and the mix of styles was then topped with a roof which had French overtones of the belle epoque (a model of the Rokumeikan can be seen in the Edo-Tokyo Museum under one of the glassed floor panels).

The Rokumeikan was meant to be a social gathering place where foreigners and the cream of Japanese society (in Western attire) could meet, dance the popular Viennese waltzes, and enjoy one another's company. All the appurtenances of modern civilization were present: a ballroom, a reading room, a billiards lounge, and a music room. Other innovations of a Western nature occurred in these modern halls, such as invitations to gatherings that were addressed to both husbands and wives, garden parties, and evening receptions. There was even a charity bazaar in 1884 that ran for three days. Surely this must have indicated to the Europeans and Americans (whom some Japanese still referred to as "red-haired barbarians") that Japan was now an equal to the West and should be treated as an equal.

The building was also meant to serve as a state-owned guest house. The former guest house in the Hama Detached Palace in Shimbashi that had received American President Grant and his wife had now fallen into disrepair. The suites for distinguished guests in the Rokumeikan could even boast an alabaster bathtub six feet long by three feet wide. Unhappily, the significance of the name of the building was lost on the Westerners it was intended to impress. Rokumeikan means "House of the Cry of the Stag," a literary reference to a Chinese classic which, as any learned Japanese would have known, referred to "a place of convivial gatherings."

Alas, the Rokumeikan did not bring about the abolition of extra-territoriality. The building soon lost popularity among the Meiji era Japanese elite, and a clamor from political rightists called for its demise as "an affront to Japanese honor." Abandoned as a cultural center, it became the Peers' Club in 1889, a mere five years after it opened, and it eventually came into use as a bank and as an insurance office. In 1940 it was finally torn down. A remembrance of the Rokumeikan lingers in a most unusual location today. In a Buddhist prayer hall in Tomyoji temple at Hirai in Edogawa-ku, one of the Italian bronze chandeliers from the ballroom of the Rokumeikan. that nineteenth-century attempt at Western civilization, now adds the light of culture to the light of Buddhist faith.

The site of the Rokumeikan has with time been covered with more modern edifices. One of the more striking examples is the Dai-ichi Kangyo Bank Building across from the Hibiya Public Hall. This thirty-two-floor building was erected in 1981, and its eastern and western walls are covered with a gray granite while the front has a stepped, glass curtain wall. A sunken mall is entered from a plaza with a large clock, and the lobby holds the sculpture Doppo la Danza by Giacomo Manzo.

Despite the failure of the Rokumeikan to survive, a new Western-style hotel was being planned, and it came into being as the Imperial Hotel in 1890 adjacent to the Rokumeikan just to the north on Hibiya-dori. The new hotel soon became a center for both foreigners and Japanese. A three-story wooden structure with verandas and arches and a mansard roof, it resembled its ill-fated next-door neighbor. The hotel could only accommodate two to three hundred guests. Nevertheless, it became the center for the "smart set" of its day. Within a year of its opening it came into unexpected use when the nearby diet chambers burned to the ground, and members of the diet had to meet in the hotel until their new legislative meeting place was available.

The one hundred rooms of the Imperial Hotel proved to be inadequate as Tokyo moved into the twentieth century. In 1915 Frank Lloyd Wright was commissioned to create a new and more modern hotel on a portion of the site of the existing Imperial Hotel. "Westernization" reached new proportions in Wright's edifice since he reworked an earlier design in a somewhat Mayan style that he had made for a non-Japanese client in Mexico and which had been rejected as too unusual. The design provided a building which was Western and modern in ambience but pre-Western in its architectural design. The building was under construction for seven years, with the usual recriminations since it ran several times over budget as well as over its timetable for completion. Its opening occurred in 1922 just as the original Imperial Hotel in front of it burned down and but one year before the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923.

Wright boasted that his building had proved to be earthquake-proof during that 1923 disaster. He credited its underlying "dish" foundation construction, whereby the building could float on its underground basin which he had designed for keeping the building from collapsing. A similar design had been used elsewhere in Tokyo whereby a structure would "float" on piles sunk in the mud. A number of these other buildings successfully survived the earthquake, some without the unfortunate settling which affected parts of Wright's building.

The vicissitudes of use, of uneven corridors and floors, of other evidences of the 1923 damage, of wartime neglect in the 1940s, of its use by the U.S. military authorities after 1945, and of the rise in land prices brought this self-proclaimed monument to Wright's genius to an untimely end in 1967. Then it was razed for the new high-rise Imperial Hotel and its later tower addition, both in the international style of the late twentieth century. A "Society to Protect the Imperial Hotel" had been organized in 1967, but the Wright hotel closed its doors forever on November 15 of that year. A portion of the original Wright Building, including the forecourt, pond, and main lounge rooms, have been saved and scrupulously restored in Meiji-mura, the outdoor museum of Victorian architectural style in Japan near Gifu City. Again, here is one of those ironies of history since this post-Meiji era unit was built in the succeeding Taisho era and in a prehistoric Mayan architectural style, and is now saved among the Victorian architectural artifacts of Japan's early modern period which has been designated as the Meiji period (1868-1912).

The post-1968 Imperial Hotel provides the latest in luxury accommodations: it has a coffee shop and restaurants as well as an arcade of shops on the lower level. Among its unexpected amenities is a swimming pool on the nineteenth floor. It is a far cry from the original Imperial Hotel of a mere one hundred rooms. In 1983 an additional unit, the Imperial Tower, was added to the 1970s building, and its first four floors are given over to very expensive luxury shops. The later Imperial Hotel is overpowering in its attempt at grandeur and has the ambience of an international airport terminal striving for recognition.

Just to the north of the Imperial Hotel on Hibiya-dori is the 1963 Nissei-Hibiya Building which contains the 1,334-seat Nissei Theater. The theater offers ballet, opera in season, and concerts and movies at other times. It provides a rather showy theater interior with its ceiling flecked with mother-of-pearl, its walls of glass mosaics and lights flashing within the walls and ceiling. Its lobby boasts an art deco ceiling and a marble floor, making it as theatrical as some of the entertainment which appears in it.

Behind the Nissei-Hibiya Building is the Takarazuka Theater on the side street to the left of the Imperial Hotel. The street is now known as Theater Street, its sidewalks increased in width and its roadway narrowed in order to handle the festive crowds attending the theaters along its length. In the period of the United States military occupation of Japan after 1945, this theater served as the Ernie Pyle Theater for American troops, named for the famed World War II correspondent who was killed on Iwo Jima. The Ernie Pyle served as a movie-and-stage theater for almost a decade, its operation giving an exceedingly large Japanese staff employment which might not otherwise have been available to them in those post-war days. The theater was restored to civilian control as the Occupation ended.

The theater was eventually returned to Japanese control, and its spectacular music and dance extravaganzas in which all the parts, male and female, are taken by young women, were resumed after a wartime and post-war hiatus. Aside from the stage with its multiple possible uses, there is a hanamichi (flower path), as in Kabuki theaters, which joins the stage at the ginbashi (silver bridge). This brings the performers in closer contact with the audience. The Takarazuka revues are offered in the most lavish settings and ornate costumes, and these revues by this Osaka-based theatrical company have immense appeal for adolescent Japanese girls and middle-aged matrons. The attraction of the theater can be attested to by an incident from the war years: when the theater was closed for wartime reasons on March 4,1944, the crowd was so large and in danger of becoming unruly that the police unsheathed their swords to maintain order.

Continuing to the east on the street which runs alongside the Imperial Hotel, one arrives at the International Arcade, which extends under the overhead railroad right-of-way. The International Arcade extends for one street in either direction as an enclosed market with a variety of goods meant to appeal to tourists: from electronic gear to new and used kimonos to souvenir items of great diversity. The shops are open from 10:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M. (until 6:00 P.M. on Sundays) and some offer tax-free shopping. To the north and still under the elevated structure are the yakitori stalls which are favored for snacks by both visitors and Tokyo residents.

At Harumi-dori to the north of the International Arcade and to the west of the overhead rail line is the Tourist Information Center on the south side of the street. Here maps, brochures, and general information for all of Japan may be obtained from English-speaking staff. The office is open weekdays from 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. and on Saturdays from 9:00 A.M. to noon. Across the street is the Hibiya Park Building, and in its northeast corner on the street parallel to Harumi-dori is the American Pharmacy, which offers American pharmaceutical supplies and can fill prescriptions. It is open from 9:00 A.M; to 7:00 P.M. Monday through Saturday and from 11:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M. on Sundays.

At the intersection of Harumi and Hibiya-dori are stairs down to several subway lines: the Chiyoda Line, the Toei Mita Line, and the Hibiya Line, while a passageway connects to the Yurakucho Line. An underground passage runs a mile to the east under Harumi-dori from Hibiya Park, and it ends at the Shimbashi Embujo Theater and the Ginza Tokyu Hotel. There are numerous exits to the street along the way.